Kage Baker believed that topics in general news come in cycles. She had no theories on why, or what influenced the schedule; but it appeared to her that specific weird things would suddenly fill her purview from time to time, in hordes – and for no known reason, she’d find herself confronting Crayola crayons for several days. Or news about exploding gas lines. Or advertisements for radium water, cocoanut water, ancient glacier water; crackpots, rumpots and How are you, Mr. Wilson?
Harvey was deeply symbolic of this entire coincidental weirdness cycle, you see. And today is a Harvey day.
Oreos has just recently celebrated its centenary with the production of a birthday cake Oreo – a lovely idea, except that they’ve replaced the cream filling with buttercreme frosting, and the cookies no longer taste like Oreos. At all. Or even smell like them, which is tragic: because that slightly bitter, burnt umber fragrance of an Oreo is especially emblematic.
Today the buzzards returned to Hinckley, Ohio (didn’t believe me, did you? Ha!). The first one was seen at 8 AM this morning.
A gorilla has been reported roaming loose in Alabama. No gorillas, though, have been reported escaping from any Alabama zoos. Witnesses are adamant that is was neither a bear nor a Bigfoot (with which, apparently, they are familiar).
A tiny dragon has been discovered in Indonesia. Actually, she is a gliding lizard, and as she was found in the act of laying eggs, it is assumed she is a member of a species:
She doesn’t breathe fire. But we haven’t found her paramour yet …
A new species of frog has been found. Of course, this happens all the time lately, but this one … lives in New York City. Kinda odd.
Bears and squirrels are learning to use tools. A juvenile bear was filmed using a stone tool to scratch itself, and a squirrel somewhere has learned to drink from a straw.
Germans, who have recently begun cautiously returning their wolves to the wild in nature preserves, have released a surprising report. The wolves don’t preferentially hunt livestock, woodcutters, or little girls with flashy hoodies. They hunt other wild animals. Apparently the go-to source for wolf management has previously been The Brothers Grimm …
Someone is turning homeless people into wifi hot spots. Someone else has figured out how to make cyborged snails that generate electricity (slowly).
Someone else reports that obligate carnivores – specifically, cats – literally lack the sensory equipment to even taste sugars: which begs the question, why then do so many domestic cats eat all the cookies and cakes they can get their paws on? Ever seen a cat disembowel a Twinkie? They like something they can taste in sweeties …
I haven’t been saving these up, Dear Readers. This has just been one of those days when weird facts are everywhere I look. The mere proliferation of them is weird in itself; like the station from the Twilight Zone has gotten a new power source and expanded its broadcast range. Maybe it has something to do with it’s being the Ides of March, when peculiar things happen all over Rome, At least in Julius Caesar: lionesses whelping in the streets, burning men wandering the city.
Cats and dogs living together … eating Hostess cupcakes. Around here, anyway.
Kathleen, Kage and the Company 
Ah, reading your blog posts is just like sitting around the campfire, quite amusing, often educating, and catering to that tiny streak in me that delights at ogling at weirdness.
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I usually feel like I am sitting around the campfire, chatting aimlessly and pontificating on absurdities to all of you. A lovely image, that.
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What a fine dragonlet! Are they revealing whether the underside of her wing-flaps is the same color? If I lived somewhere more tropical, I’d be volunteering my backtard for a captive-breeding habitat.
In days of yore, we had a cat who would wait till we were all eating dinner, then he would eat all the meringue off the lemon meringue pie out in the kitchen – not a single tongue-mark on the lemon filling, so the sweetened meringue clearly was the superior substance, cat-wise.
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No, none of the photos yet showed the underside of her wings – but isn’t she a beauty? They took some photos and measurements, and then they let her go. But they are keeping an eye on the nest, to see how the hatchlings do
Meringue and the insides of Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies: cats love them.
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Love the dragon! (Maybe people used to be much smaller).
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To Homo floresiensis – also an Indonesian exotic – this little beauty would have been a fine shoulder dragon.
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I’ve been reading a lot about H. floresiensis (and other fossil hominids) lately as research for something I’m writing, and I love this image.
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One of my cats has an unfeline devotion to anything molasses-flavored. She’s also shameless about stealing food; she tried to scoop food I was chewing out of my mouth with her paw once!
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Clearly, there is something not yet completely understood about cats and sweeties. The study is basing its conclusion on a “broken” gene found in obligate carnivores – I suspect there is another factor in the feline genome compensating. Or, like intelligence tests, cats are just so contrary they’re doing something weird just to freak us out.
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Elaine – the hominid story just gets more fascinating all the time, doesn’t it? It appears that only in the last 30,000 years or so have we been the only kind around. Makes one rather lonely … and makes one wonder at the truth under all the stories about Others in the waste places. It was something that really intrigued Kage, too.
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